The Pandemic Has Shown That America is a Very Broken State

If nothing else, the Covid-19 pandemic is revealing that years of Republican policies - both under George W. Bush, while the GOP held the U.S. Senate and obstructed the Obama administration efforts, and now under the corrupt and incompetent regime of Der Trumpenführer - have left America a broken state.  Some might even argue a failed state.  Clearly, America is not the nation that won WWII and was the unrivaled leader of the world in the post-WWII era, leading in technology, manufacturing, science and a government infrastructure and economy that worked for a majority of Americans.  The GOP has long sought to bring back the Gilded Age of the late 1800's and pre-WWI era when the robber barons and incredible rich payed little in taxes while the rest of the citizenry struggled to get bay.  Under the Trump/Pence regime, much of this GOP agenda has been realized with huge tax cuts for the wealthy, the rolling back of health and safety regulations, and an economic system designed to benefit the wealthy first and foremost.  Now, the pandemic gripping the nation has pulled back the curtain and revealed the consequences of GOP policies.  A very long piece in The Atlantic looks at where America finds itself and the decision that must be made as to where the nation goes from here.  The following are article highlights: 

When the virus came here, it found a country with serious underlying conditions, and it exploited them ruthlessly. Chronic ills—a corrupt political class, a sclerotic bureaucracy, a heartless economy, a divided and distracted public—had gone untreated for years. We had learned to live, uncomfortably, with the symptoms. It took the scale and intimacy of a pandemic to expose their severity—to shock Americans with the recognition that we are in the high-risk category. 

The crisis demanded a response that was swift, rational, and collective. The United States reacted instead like Pakistan or Belarus—like a country with shoddy infrastructure and a dysfunctional government whose leaders were too corrupt or stupid to head off mass suffering. The administration squandered two irretrievable months to prepare. From [Trump] the president came willful blindness, scapegoating, boasts, and lies. From his mouthpieces, conspiracy theories and miracle cures. A few senators and corporate executives acted quickly—not to prevent the coming disaster, but to profit from it. When a government doctor tried to warn the public of the danger, the White House took the mic and politicized the message. Every morning in the endless month of March, Americans woke up to find themselves citizens of a failed state. With no national plan—no coherent instructions at all—families, schools, and offices were left to decide on their own whether to shut down and take shelter. When test kits, masks, gowns, and ventilators were found to be in desperately short supply, governors pleaded for them from the White House, which stalled, then called on private enterprise, which couldn’t deliver. States and cities were forced into bidding wars that left them prey to price gouging and corporate profiteering. Civilians took out their sewing machines to try to keep ill-equipped hospital workers healthy and their patients alive. Russia, Taiwan, and the United Nations sent humanitarian aid to the world’s richest power—a beggar nation in utter chaos. Donald Trump saw the crisis almost entirely in personal and political terms. Fearing for his reelection, he declared the coronavirus pandemic a war, and himself a wartime president. But the leader he brings to mind is Marshal Philippe Pétain, the French general who, in 1940, signed an armistice with Germany after its rout of French defenses, then formed the pro-Nazi Vichy regime. Like Pétain, Trump collaborated with the invader and abandoned his country to a prolonged disaster. And, like France in 1940, America in 2020 has stunned itself with a collapse that’s larger and deeper than one miserable leader.

[I]t should force a question that most Americans have never had to ask: Do we trust our leaders and one another enough to summon a collective response to a mortal threat? Are we still capable of self-government?

This is the third major crisis of the short 21st century. The first, on September 11, 2001, came when Americans were still living mentally in the previous century, and the memory of depression, world war, and cold war remained strong. On that day, people in the rural heartland did not see New York as an alien stew of immigrants and liberals that deserved its fate, but as a great American city that had taken a hit for the whole country.

Partisan politics and terrible policies, especially the Iraq War, erased the sense of national unity and fed a bitterness toward the political class that never really faded. The second crisis, in 2008, intensified it. At the top, the financial crash could almost be considered a success. Congress passed a bipartisan bailout bill that saved the financial system. Outgoing Bush-administration officials cooperated with incoming Obama administration officials. . . . . . All of the lasting pain was felt in the middle and at the bottom, by Americans who had taken on debt and lost their jobs, homes, and retirement savings. Many of them never recovered, and young people who came of age in the Great Recession are doomed to be poorer than their parents. Inequality—the fundamental, relentless force in American life since the late 1970s—grew worse. Social bonds had been under growing strain for several decades, and now they began to tear. The reforms of the Obama years, important as they were—in health care, financial regulation, green energy—had only palliative effects. The long recovery over the past decade enriched corporations and investors, lulled professionals, and left the working class further behind. The lasting effect of the slump was to increase polarization and to discredit authority, especially government’s. Trump came to power as the repudiation of the Republican establishment. But the conservative political class and the new leader soon reached an understanding. Whatever their differences on issues like trade and immigration, they shared a basic goal: to strip-mine public assets for the benefit of private interests. Republican politicians and donors who wanted government to do as little as possible for the common good could live happily with a regime that barely knew how to govern at all, and they made themselves Trump’s footmen. Like a wanton boy throwing matches in a parched field, Trump began to immolate what was left of national civic life. He never even pretended to be president of the whole country, but pitted us against one another along lines of race, sex, religion, citizenship, education, region, and—every day of his presidency—political party. His main tool of governance was to lie. A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying. Trump acquired a federal government crippled by years of right-wing ideological assault, politicization by both parties, and steady defunding. He set about finishing off the job and destroying the professional civil service. He drove out some of the most talented and experienced career officials, left essential positions unfilled, and installed loyalists as commissars over the cowed survivors, with one purpose: to serve his own interests. His major legislative accomplishment, one of the largest tax cuts in history, sent hundreds of billions of dollars to corporations and the rich. This was the American landscape that lay open to the virus: in prosperous cities, a class of globally connected desk workers dependent on a class of precarious and invisible service workers; in the countryside, decaying communities in revolt against the modern world; on social media, mutual hatred and endless vituperation among different camps; in the economy, even with full employment, a large and growing gap between triumphant capital and beleaguered labor; in Washington, an empty government led by a con man and his intellectually bankrupt party; around the country, a mood of cynical exhaustion, with no vision of a shared identity or future. If the pandemic really is a kind of war, it’s the first to be fought on this soil in a century and a half. Invasion and occupation expose a society’s fault lines, exaggerating what goes unnoticed or accepted in peacetime, clarifying essential truths, raising the smell of buried rot.
 The virus should have united Americans against a common threat. With different leadership, it might have. Instead, even as it spread from blue to red areas, attitudes broke down along familiar partisan lines. The virus also should have been a great leveler. You don’t have to be in the military or in debt to be a target—you just have to be human. But from the start, its effects have been skewed by the inequality that we’ve tolerated for so long. . . . . . ordinary people with fevers and chills had to wait in long and possibly infectious lines, only to be turned away because they weren’t actually suffocating. An internet joke proposed that the only way to find out whether you had the virus was to sneeze in a rich person’s face. [T]he rich had been allowed to buy their way out of military service and hoard gas masks. As the contagion has spread, its victims have been likely to be poor, black, and brown people. The gross inequality of our health-care system is evident in the sight of refrigerated trucks lined up outside public hospitals. We now have two categories of work: essential and nonessential. Who have the essential workers turned out to be? Mostly people in low-paying jobs that require their physical presence and put their health directly at risk: warehouse workers, shelf-stockers, Instacart shoppers, delivery drivers, municipal employees, hospital staffers, home health aides, long-haul truckers. Doctors and nurses are the pandemic’s combat heroes, but the supermarket cashier with her bottle of sanitizer and the UPS driver with his latex gloves are the supply and logistics troops who keep the frontline forces intact. In a smartphone economy that hides whole classes of human beings, we’re learning where our food and goods come from, who keeps us alive. The pandemic has also clarified the meaning of nonessential workers. One example is Kelly Loeffler, the Republican junior senator from Georgia, whose sole qualification for the empty seat that she was given in January is her immense wealth. Less than three weeks into the job, after a dire private briefing about the virus, she got even richer from the selling-off of stocks, then she accused Democrats of exaggerating the danger and gave her constituents false assurances that may well have gotten them killed. Loeffler’s impulses in public service are those of a dangerous parasite. The purest embodiment of political nihilism is not Trump himself but his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner. In his short lifetime, Kushner has been fraudulently promoted as both a meritocrat and a populist. He was born into a moneyed real-estate family the month Ronald Reagan entered the Oval Office, in 1981—a princeling of the second Gilded Age. Despite Jared’s mediocre academic record, he was admitted to Harvard after his father, Charles, pledged a $2.5 million donation to the university. Father helped son with $10 million in loans for a start in the family business, then Jared continued his elite education at the law and business schools of NYU, where his father had contributed $3 million. [W]hen his father-in-law became president, Kushner quickly gained power in an administration that raised amateurism, nepotism, and corruption to governing principles. As long as he busied himself with Middle East peace, his feckless meddling didn’t matter to most Americans. But since he became an influential adviser to Trump on the coronavirus pandemic, the result has been mass death. To watch this pale, slim-suited dilettante breeze into the middle of a deadly crisis, dispensing business-school jargon to cloud the massive failure of his father-in-law’s administration, is to see the collapse of a whole approach to governing. It turns out that scientific experts and other civil servants are not traitorous members of a “deep state”—they’re essential workers, and marginalizing them in favor of ideologues and sycophants is a threat to the nation’s health. It turns out that “nimble” companies can’t prepare for a catastrophe or distribute lifesaving goods—only a competent federal government can do that. It turns out that everything has a cost, and years of attacking government, squeezing it dry and draining its morale, inflict a heavy cost that the public has to pay in lives. All the programs defunded, stockpiles depleted, and plans scrapped meant that we had become a second-rate nation. Then came the virus and this strange defeat. The fight to overcome the pandemic must also be a fight to recover the health of our country, and build it anew, or the hardship and grief we’re now enduring will never be redeemed. Under our current leadership, nothing will change. If 9/11 and 2008 wore out trust in the old political establishment, 2020 should kill off the idea that anti-politics is our salvation. But putting an end to this regime, so necessary and deserved, is only the beginning.

We’re faced with a choice that the crisis makes inescapably clear. We can stay hunkered down in self-isolation, fearing and shunning one another, letting our common bond wear away to nothing. Or we can use this pause in our normal lives to pay attention . . . We can learn from these dreadful days that stupidity and injustice are lethal; that, in a democracy, being a citizen is essential work; that the alternative to solidarity is death. After we’ve come out of hiding and taken off our masks, we should not forget what it was like to be alone.

We Need a New Version of Capitalism

Republicans - especially Donald Trump - are eager to depict whoever the Democrat presidential nominee turns out to be as a socialist and a threat to capitalism and somehow an enemy of average Americans even though the Democrat agenda is to improve the lot of a majority of Americans, not just the wealthy and big corporations as the GOP made clear was its goal in the form of the Trump/GOP tax cuts and the Trump/Pence regime efforts to roll back safety regulations and clean air and clean water regulations while destroying labor unions.  The irony is that many in Trump's base long for the 1950's when life was better for many because of labor unions that upheld wages and the far higher taxes paid by the wealthy funded infrastructure projects such as the Interstate highway system. In short, today's version of capitalism has turned toxic for the majority - much as was the case in the Gild Age, a time the GOP seeks to seemingly restore.  Not all of the wealthy are content to see income disparities continue to rise as the wallow in greed.  David Walentas, a visionary New York real estate developer definitely not cut from the same cloth as Trump, just made a $100 million gift to the University of Virginia to benefit students from families where no one has ever attended college.  Then there is Marc Benioff who argues that a new capitalism is needed in a column in the New York Times.  Here are column highlights:

Capitalism, I acknowledge, has been good to me.  Over the past 20 years, the company that I co-founded, Salesforce, has generated billions in profits and made me a very wealthy person. I have been fortunate to live a life beyond the wildest imaginations of my great-grandfather, who immigrated to San Francisco from Kiev in the late 1800s.

Yet, as a capitalist, I believe it’s time to say out loud what we all know to be true: Capitalism, as we know it, is dead.

Yes, free markets — and societies that cherish scientific research and innovation — have pioneered new industries, discovered cures that have saved millions from disease and unleashed prosperity that has lifted billions of people out of poverty.

But capitalism as it has been practiced in recent decades — with its obsession on maximizing profits for shareholders — has also led to horrifying inequality. Globally, the 26 richest people in the world now have as much wealth as the poorest 3.8 billion people, and the relentless spewing of carbon emissions is pushing the planet toward catastrophic climate change. In the United States, income inequality has reached its highest level in at least 50 years, with the top 0.1 percent — people like me — owning roughly 20 percent of the wealth while many Americans cannot afford to pay for a $400 emergency. It’s no wonder that support for capitalism has dropped, especially among young people. To my fellow business leaders and billionaires, I say that we can no longer wash our hands of our responsibility or what people do with our products. Yes, profits are important, but so is society. And if our quest for greater profits leaves our world worse off than before, all we will have taught our children is the power of greed.

It’s time for a new capitalism — a more fair, equal and sustainable capitalism that actually works for everyone and where businesses, including tech companies, don’t just take from society but truly give back and have a positive impact.

What might a new capitalism look like?

First, business leaders need to embrace a broader vision of their responsibilities by looking beyond shareholder return and also measuring their stakeholder return. This requires that they focus not only on their shareholders, but also on all of their stakeholders — their employees, customers, communities and the planet. Fortunately, nearly 200 executives with the Business Roundtable recently committed their companies, including Salesforce, to this approach, saying that the “purpose of a corporation” includes “a fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders.” Unfortunately, not everyone agrees. . . . . When asked whether companies should serve all stakeholders and whether capitalism should be updated, Vice President Mike Pence warned against “leftist policies.”

But suggesting that companies must choose between doing well and doing good is a false choice. Successful businesses can and must do both. In fact, with political dysfunction in Washington, D.C., Americans overwhelmingly say C.E.O.s should take the lead on economic and social challenges, and employees, investors and customers increasingly seek out companies that share their values.

Legislation to close loopholes in the Equal Pay Act have stalled in Congress for years, and today women still only make about 80 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men. But congressional inaction does not absolve companies from their responsibility. Since learning that we were paying women less than men for equal work at Salesforce, we have spent $10.3 million to ensure equal pay; today we conduct annual audits to ensure that pay remains equal. Just about every company, I suspect, has a pay gap — and every company can close it now.

For many businesses, giving back to their communities is an afterthought — something they only do after they’ve turned a profit. But by integrating philanthropy into our company culture from the beginning — giving 1 percent of our equity, time and technology — Salesforce has donated nearly $300 million to worthy causes, including local public schools and addressing homelessness.

Globally, few nations are meeting their targets to fight climate change, the current United States presidential administration remains determined to withdraw from the Paris Agreement and global emissions continue to rise. As governments fiddle, there are steps that business can take now, while there’s still time . . . .

Skeptical business leaders who say that having a purpose beyond profit hurts the bottom line should look at the facts. Research shows that companies that embrace a broader mission — and, importantly, integrate that purpose into their corporate culture — outperform their peers, grow faster, and deliver higher profits.

Of course, C.E.O. activism and corporate philanthropy alone will never be enough to meet the immense scale of today’s challenges. It could take $23 billion a year to address racial inequalities in our public schools. College graduates are drowning in $1.6 trillion of student debt. It will cost billions to retrain American workers for the digital jobs of the future. Trillions of dollars of investments will be needed to avert the worst effects of climate change. All this, when our budget deficit has already surpassed $1 trillion.

That is why a new capitalism must also include a tax system that generates the resources we need and includes higher taxes on the wealthiest among us. . . . . Nationally, increasing taxes on high-income individuals like myself would help generate the trillions of dollars that we desperately need to improve education and health care and fight climate change.

The culture of corporate America needs to change, and it shouldn’t take an act of Congress to do it. Every C.E.O. and every company must recognize that their responsibilities do not stop at the edge of the corporate campus. When we finally start focusing on stakeholder value as well as shareholder value, our companies will be more successful, our communities will be more equal, our societies will be more just and our planet will be healthier.

Trump and his vulture capitalist cronies embody the direct opposite of this responsible proposal.

America Is Failing Its Children and Youth

We hear incessant bloviating (lies is a better term) from the White House about "making America great again." yet Trump's trade war is inflicting serious harm on both American manufacturing and farmers are being decimated financially. Yes, many of these individuals/businesses back Trump and arguably deserve whatever befalls them.  What is less covered by the media and far too many politicians is the reality that statistics increasingly show that America, now more than ever, is failing its children and youth.  "Old Europe" - so much maligned by the far right and Republicans - now affords significantly more upward social/economic mobility to its citizens than America now offers to its citizens.  Infant mortality continues to be far higher in America - the United States ranks 37th in terms of child well-being - and the costs are astronomical both in terms of cost and lost lives and lost potential.  With Democrat presidential candidates debating as I write this blog, let's hope that some part of the debate focuses on America's youth.  A column in the New York Times looks at this pressing problem.  Here are excerpts:

[I]gnoring the welfare of our young is a day-to-day problem in America, where our children are falling behind those in other wealthy countries.

On Thursday, 10 Democratic presidential candidates will debate. It would be a natural opportunity to provoke a national conversation on the subject. But a question about child poverty hasn’t been asked at a presidential debate in 20 years, not since a Republican primary debate in 1999, according to the Children’s Defense Fund.

UNICEF says America ranks No. 37 among countries in well-being of children, and Save the Children puts the United States at No. 36. European countries dominate the top places.

American infants at last count were 76 percent more likely to die in their first year than children in other advanced countries, according to an article last year in the journal Health Affairs. We would save the lives of 20,000 American children each year if we could just achieve the same child mortality rates as the rest of the rich world.

Half a million American kids also suffer lead poisoning each year, and the youth suicide rate is at its highest level on record.

These problems have been magnified under President Trump, though American policy has shortchanged children as a whole for decades. The Census Bureau reported this week that the number of uninsured children increased by 425,000 last year.

Trump also gave the green light to a pesticide that I call Dow Chemical’s Nerve Gas Pesticide. Formally called chlorpyrifos, it is associated with brain damage among young children. Over the objections of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the Trump administration claims it’s safe. So when will we see it sprayed in the White House to handle cockroaches?

James Heckman, a Nobel laureate in economics at the University of Chicago, calculates that investments in early childhood programs for at-risk kids have an astronomical return, because of improved productivity and reduced spending on police forces, courts, jails, special education and health care.

Likewise, one study found that each dollar invested in reducing lead poisoning among children pays for itself at least 17 times over.

Here’s a suggestion for the candidates: Embrace a landmark report this year from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine that outlines how to reduce child poverty by half over 10 years. This can be done: Britain under Tony Blair halved child poverty in less than a decade.

The national academies calculate that a combination of job programs and child allowances could cut child poverty in half in the United States at a cost of about $100 billion a year. Yes, that’s a lot of money. But child poverty has an economic cost in crime, lost productivity and other expenses that is at least $800 billion a year, the academies report. The real question isn’t whether we can afford to act, but whether we can afford not to.

We don’t lack the tools to help, or the resources. The challenge is just that in our political system, children don’t count — and never get mentioned in presidential debates.

“Kids don’t vote,” notes Nadine Burke Harris, the surgeon general of California and an expert on the lifelong costs of childhood trauma. “They require us to speak for them.”

EPA Is Hiding Proof That a Widely Used Chemical Causes Leukemia

Under the Trump/Pence regime, the EPA has ceased worrying about protecting the environment and the health of American citizens.  Instead, its focus has become one of protecting industries and allowing the destruction of the environment.  Now, endangering the lives of citizens can be added to the EPA's agenda.  While Scott Pruitt has resigned as head of the agency, do not expect things to improve as long as Trump/Pence remain in power. As a number of news outlets are reporting, the EPA is suppressing the release of its finalized its conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia and other cancers.  Better to protect industry and chemical companies than the lives of both American children and adults.  A piece in New York Magazine looks at this disturbing malice towards the safety of citizens.   Here are article highlights:

During a Senate hearing in late January, Ed Markey asked then-EPA director Scott Pruitt about a little rumor that he’d overheard. “It’s my understanding,” the Massachusetts senator said, “that the EPA has finalized its conclusion that formaldehyde causes leukemia and other cancers and that [the] completed new assessment is ready to be released for public review, but is being held up.”

Formaldehyde is one of the most ubiquitous industrial chemicals in the United States. It’s in much of the wooden furniture that Americans sit in, the body wash they clean themselves with — and, for those who live in the vicinity of a major refinery, the air that they breathe. And here, the director of the agency responsible for protecting the American people from toxic chemicals was saying, under oath, that he was vaguely aware of a report linking formaldehyde to a variety of terminal illnesses.

If that report were released — and its findings independently verified by the National Academies of Sciences — then the EPA would strengthen restrictions on the chemical’s use, while cancer patients could draw on the findings in class-action lawsuits. The effect of all this would be to force industry to reduce its reliance on formaldehyde — and thus, to reduce the number of Americans who suffer from the ravages of Leukemia, nose and throat cancer, and a variety of less severe respiratory ailments.

[O]n Friday, a blockbuster report from Politico offered some insight into the cause of the EPA’s silence.

On January 24, the EPA’s top officials took a meeting with the American Chemistry Council’s Formaldehyde Panel — an industry group representing a variety of firms, including Exxon Mobil and a Koch Industries’ subsidiary. Two days later, the panel’s leader Kimberly Wise White wrote the EPA a letter, saying, “As stated in our meeting, a premature release of a draft assessment … will cause irreparable harm to the companies represented by the Panel and to the many companies and jobs that depend on the broad use of the chemical.”

In November 2017, Pruitt had removed multiple academic scientists from the EPA’s influential Science Advisory Board. He replaced with industry advocates — among them, Kimberly Wise White.

EPA officials who spoke with Politico say that the “scientific advice” of White and her ilk has led the agency to suppress the draft report on formaldehyde, as part of a broader “campaign to undermine the agency’s independent research into the health risks of toxic chemicals.”

That campaign has included a proposal to limit the EPA’s use of certain kinds of data on human health — while maintaining a special exemption for confidential, industry-funded studies that contain such data. Pruitt and his aides have also sought to postpone the release of a Health department study that suggests nonstick chemicals pose health risks, even at levels that the EPA had previously deemed safe — and, last May, the passionately “pro-life” EPA director overruled his agency’s scientists, and declined to ban a pesticide that’s been linked to fetal brain damage.

Trump’s appointees aren’t trying to subject the EPA’s report to independent scrutiny — they’re trying to prevent such scrutiny. As Politico explains: By blocking the report at the first step of the IRIS review process, political appointees are keeping it from being reviewed by the National Academies of Sciences, an independent panel of the country’s top scientists that must weigh in on all such risk assessments.

Pruitt is, of course, gone; his personal corruption having become too much of a distraction from his agency’s vital mission of helping the Republican Party’s donors evade financial responsibility for poisoning Americans.

But that mission is safe in the hands of the EPA’s new acting director, Andrew Wheeler. As staff director for the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in 2004, Wheeler worked to delay an earlier version of the EPA’s formaldehyde analysis – and went on to profitable career as chemical industry lobbyist.

[A] recent Gallup poll found a supermajority of voters saying that the government is doing “too little” to protect the environment, while 57 percent of respondents said the government should prioritize environmental protection over economic growth.

[T]he public is already inclined to believe that Republicans are too deferential to polluters. Thus, Democrats would be wise to campaign against the GOP’s policy of “giving more Americans cancer and fetal defects for the sake of keeping chemical manufacturers’ regulatory compliance costs low” this fall.